Informazioni aggiuntive

This paper proposes a novel approach to interpret the results of a classical second-order false
belief task (the ice cream man task) administered to children in order to investigate their Theory
of Mind. We adopted a dialogical perspective to study the adult-child discussion in this research
setting. In particular, we see the adult-child conversation as an argumentative discussion in
which children are asked to justify their answers to the questions asked by the researcher. We
analysed the specificities of the research setting as an argumentative activity type; we reconstructed and analysed the children's answers on the basis of two models taken from
Argumentation theory (the pragma-dialectical model and the Argumentum Model of Topics). Our
findings show that some of the children's partially “incorrect” answers depend on the pragmatics
of the conversation, the relation between explicit and implicit content, and a misunderstanding of
the discussion issue. Other “incorrect” answers are actually based on correct inferences but they do not meet the researchers' expectations, because the children do not share the same material premises as the researchers. These findings invite further research on children's reasoning and on the characteristics of argumentation within a research task.